Drobo-storage maker Data Robotics has changed its company name to Drobo.
Drobo is a 4- and 8-bay desktop storage product that users can populate with hard drives they source themselves and which can be of dissimilar sizes. The box has a simple blue, green and red coloured light management system which signals when it is nearing …

Re: Wahtever

Fail. Just fail.

Either a very very very out-of-touch person (by about four and a half decades, presumably) or someone who thinks pretending to be makes them 'edgy'. For some reason, the post made me think of why my mum loves the show 'Grumpy Old Men' but hates the later counterpart 'Grumpy Old Women' - she says the former are grumpy about interesting things, while the latter mostly just seem to like whining for the sake of it.

...

I really really like the concept behind Drobo.

I am still very much on the fence regarding the particular implementation, and probably will be for a few more years of 'burn-in' time.

Well done...

Jake, read up on what the Drobo devices actually do, and you may be pleasantly surprised. Their 'beyond RAID' system is pretty clever and very flexible, and saves you juggling data around as your storage requirements grow.

Not a replacement for a SAN, but a godsend for anyone that works with lots of local data (our multimedia designer creates way too much 'temporary' data to slap on the network or their local drive, but a 4 bay Drobo solved the problem).

Not the same thing

QNAP does proper old fashioned RAID, striping across drives or mirroring, expansion involves rebuilding a drive from parity, basically an exact copy of the previous drive on a larger disk, repeat for all drives then enable the extra storage space. Performance is notably better if all the drives are of the same model.

Drobo does block level mirroring across whatever drives it decides are best suited for the data, if you drop a drive and replace it with another of different capacity, you'll end up with different blocks written to it than the original, essentially, what drobo does is ensure all data is on the array twice, it doesn't matter what type or size the drives are because they don't need to be in sync to read data off, drobo just reads from the most convenient drive.

That's the theory, and technically it works well, you can mix and match any old drives in there and expanding the array requires *nothing* more than popping a drive out and sliding a bigger one in, in practice however, throughput steadily slows down until it's unbearable to work with and starts causing timing issues with some applications, the only fix I've found is to clone the entire array, wipe it and then copy everything back, this will need repeating every x months, depending on the data and churn rate.